Building 30 (Works Services Building and Water Tower)

Details

STANTON ST QUINTIN

1384/0/10022 HULLAVINGTON BARRACKS 01-DEC-05 Building 30 (Works Services Building a nd Water Tower)

GV II General services building with main station water tower. 1935 - 6. A Bulloch, architectural advisor to the Air Ministry's Directorate of Works and Buildings. Drawing No. 1034/35. Bath stone ashlar on brick walls, concrete roofs and some tower structure.

A complex group of mainly low single-storey structures, forming a rectangular layout to internal courtyards, and a tall water-tower. Steel casement windows with horizontal bars in 2:3:3:2-lights to the road frontage; above these a wide dormer with 8 shallow lights. To the right a plank door in the small porch. The rear wall is plain, but above is a dormer identical to that on the front. Walls rise to a flush coped parapet all round.

The encircling buildings include workshops, stores and garages. The water tower is rectangular on plan, rising sheer to a slightly inset parapet. The short sides have a single and the long sides a triple 'slot' rising from a projecting sill to plain arched heads, and with 3 slightly recessed horizontal strengthening bands. To the front (SE) the slot rises from a square cantilevered balcony above a deep-set double plank door in an arch of two orders, with responds and a keystone. The left-hand side of the tower has a wide double doorway beneath deep over-light and flanked by tall single lights. Left of the tower, a low link wall to an opening continues as a higher plain wall taken the full length of the return and back, with 2 small vertical lights. The back has a variety of small units, including a pair of garages, and two openings into courtyards, within which a taller unit with 3 metal flues or vents is attached to the tower.

To the right of the tower units have flat roofs behind high parapets, and steel casements set to continuous lintel courses; to the front is a formal unit with central door flanked by 2 windows each side, and the return includes a set-back workshop with 3 very wide 3-light clerestory windows. Detailing appears generally to the original, with steel casements, all with horizontal bars, and with continuous lintel courses.

INTERIOR: steel stair to water tower.

HISTORY: This design, although apparently very simple, has obviously been conceived with great sensitivity and clear Art Deco influences. It is a very prominent structure that dominates the whole base both by its size, and its crucial location on the main axis through the whole base, centred on the main gates, and passing through the centre of the parade ground and terminating in the control tower (qv).

Hullavington, which opened on June 6th 1937 as a Flying Training Station, is in every respect the key station most strongly representative of the improved architectural quality characteristic of the air bases developed under the post-1934 expansion of the RAF. Its position in the west of England with other training and maintenance bases also prompted its selection in 1938 as one of series of Aircraft Storage Units for the storage of vital reserves destined for the operational front-line. For further details on the site, see Buildings 59, 60 and 61 (The Officers' Mess).

Legacy

The contents of this record have been generated from a legacy data system.

Legacy System number:

496006

Legacy System:

LBS

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